Monday, January 11, 2021

Seeing the Future Clearly: Optical Character Recognition for Invoice Automation

As part of the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) project's continuous improvement efforts, the spend team has recommended UVA implement the Jaggaer Optical Character Recognition (OCR) product called Digital Mail Room. OCR technology recognizes text in scanned documents, such as invoices, or images and turns it into text data readable by other software.

Adopting usage of an OCR tool would decrease the manual entry of invoices. For example, in fiscal year (FY) 2020, UVA employees manually keyed roughly 55,000 purchase order invoices. Automating the process would reduce the manual efforts of those across Grounds currently keying data and potentially reduce errors. 

When evaluating options, usability factored highly in the decision-making criteria for potential OCR vendors. Jaggaer Digital Mail Room ranked tied for number one in terms of ease of use for end users. An added benefit of Digital Mail Room is that it will work well with Workday Financials' standard interface to enable automated communication between systems; this means invoice information will transfer from Digital Mail Room to Workday smoothly with little added integration preparation.

The RAPID decision whether to act on this recommendation has gone through the review and input process and will likely be finalized soon. If adopted, as expected, Jaggaer Digital Mail Room may be implemented prior to Workday Financials or would go-live with Workday on July 1, 2022.      

For information about project decisions, see the FST Decision Log

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